Prince

by Matt Thorne

  Khan gets a co-production credit, but this sounds less like any of her previous albums and more like the other records Prince was working on at this time, New Power Soul and the Graham Central Station album. Engineer H. M. Buff says there weren’t many songs carried forward to this album from other projects – only ‘Journey 2 the Center of Your Heart’ (originally considered for Emancipation) and ‘Don’t Talk 2 Strangers’ (carried over from the ill-fated I’ll Do Anything soundtrack) – and that there weren’t many out-takes from this project, the most significant being a cover of Etta James’s song ‘At Last’. But it is perhaps less appealing to Khan fans than to those who enjoy this particular era of Prince’s music. The sound he created with Kirk Johnson and H. M. Buff has been much dismissed, yet when considered as part of Prince’s long career, it is well worth reappraisal.

  ‘Come 2 My House’,11 for example, is entirely dependent on the strange playing of The Hornheadz, transforming what could be a straightforward funk song into extremely off-kilter jazz. ‘This Crazy Life of Mine’ is, the notes suggest, ‘Chaka’s summation of her life as she’s lived it thus far,’ but the Clare Fischer strings and sound FX rob the story of any drama. ‘Betcha Eye’ is far more dependent on Larry Graham’s bass than Khan’s simple, repetitive vocal. ‘Pop My Clutch’ is a terrible song, Prince returning to the car = vagina link that once served him well, another example (like ‘Hit U in the Socket’) of the strange tendency he has of wanting older women to sing songs based around embarrassingly inappropriate R&B-style sexual metaphors, though it does at least feature a cameo from Queen Latifah.

  H. M. Buff says that ‘demo’ is not the right word for the original songs produced by Prince and later covered by other artists, saying instead that they were always initially fully produced songs by Prince. Hence odd out-takes such as Prince’s version of ‘I’ll Never B Another Fool’, where he inhabits a female persona and sings about not opening his legs for insecure men and tattooing himself to get over another new heartbreak.

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  As it’s a co-write with Chaka Khan, it’s not entirely clear whether Prince is constructing it from her beliefs or his own, but ‘Democrazy’ is a somewhat disturbing song in which they explain why they don’t believe in the democratic system.

  ‘Eye Remember U’, a snoozy light-jazz song, is a co-write not just between Khan and Prince, but Larry Graham too, though he doesn’t appear on the track, the bass being played by Rhonda Smith, who played such an important role in Prince’s sound during this era. ‘Reconsider (U Betta)’, meanwhile, could easily have fitted on Emancipation. The new creative relationship between Graham, Khan and Prince is also demonstrated in Khan’s wonderful cover of Graham’s ‘Hair’, which doesn’t feature Prince but does have Mayte on finger cymbals. As Buff remembers: ‘“Hair” was great. I worked in two studios at once in that session. It was one of the highlights. I did [another non-Prince track] “Spoon” and “Hair” at the same time. It was really fun.’

  The Graham Central Station album GCS2000 was less reliant on Prince as a lyricist, and though he plays throughout the album, he co-wrote only one song for it, ‘Utopia’, in which Larry Graham declines fame and being a spiritual leader in favour of slapping his bass. Though many Prince fans resent Graham for getting Prince to give up swearing and for their shared religious beliefs, the record, which has a similar arrangement and cast of musicians as the Chaka Khan album, works as much as the third in a trilogy including Come 2 My House and New Power Soul as it does a Larry Graham album.

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  Prince’s gifts to other bands have slowed in recent years. He helped try to launch former producer Kirk Johnson’s Fonky Bald Heads project, and gave songs to two female singers renowned for their strength and independence – Gwen Stefani of No Doubt and Ani DiFranco, both of whom would appear on Prince’s own Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (he would also allow Maceo Parker to cover three songs from this album on his own record) – but his most substantial next act of collaboration would initially take place onstage instead of in the studio.

  As frustrating as it must have been for fans expecting a conventional Prince show, I think his decision to become a side-man for new protégée Támar on a 2006 tour was among the most interesting experiments he’s attempted throughout his entire career, and while the eventual (still unreleased) album was, like much of his later work with protégés, not quite up to the standard of his own output, the Támar Featuring Prince tour was largely thrilling. The best shows were the ones where Prince mixed up the set list and dropped in unusual covers – such as one at the Butter restaurant in New York, where he played a lengthy version of ‘The Ride’ and covered Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’ – but though seeing Prince as a side-man for a young R&B singer was a shock for most, the process clearly helped him realise that he wanted to be a front man again, and since then he has spoken onstage about the value of this period for him.

  The Támar-era shows are underrated and her still-unreleased album, Beautiful, Loved and Blessed, while not quite as good as 3121, is superior to many released protégé records. Támar is a talented singer, with a rapping voice similar to Eve’s, and songs like ‘Closer 2 My Heart’, ‘Milk and Honey’ and ‘Holla and Shout’ are appealing R&B, with Prince producing perfect future-funk, while she alternates between singing and raps. The ballads (‘Can’t Keep Living Alone’, ‘All Eye Want Is U’, ‘First Love’, ‘Sunday in the Park’) are more generic, and one song (‘Holy Ground’) is a true mish-mash that features Prince yet again constructing a song around the Lord’s Prayer, this time combining it with The Wizard of Oz (he would soon begin covering ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ in concert) and a little of ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’. But there are a few true standouts worthy of consideration as a significant part of Prince’s oeuvre. ‘Kept Woman’ shows him stretching into new territory (for him, if not music in general; the situation is clichéd, a mistress singing about her plight), and it’s more mature than anything he wrote for Sheila E, Vanity or Carmen Electra (and most of the songs he wrote for Mavis Staples or Chaka Khan). ‘Beautiful, Loved and Blessed’ (also on 3121) is one of Prince’s most explicit acknowledgements of the process he goes through with a protégé, combined with yet another Edenic rebirth.

  ‘Redheaded Stepchild’ is a strange hybrid of R&B and metal and is among Prince’s best tracks, the one point on the album when he seemed not to be imitating chart music but reminding the listener what he could bring to this sort of song that no other producer could. It remained in his set list after the departure of Támar. While the songs on which Michael B and Sonny T appear have not been identified, there seem some significant similarities between this song and the best of Exodus. While Prince kept ‘Redheaded Stepchild’ in his set, the one song he re-recorded for official release was ‘Kept Woman’, with Prince carrying it forward to the album he wrote for his next protégée, Bria Valente’s Elixer (the punning title causing more than one Prince fan I know to shudder). Though Prince has remained quiet about the relationship, it would appear from interviews he gave to support 20Ten (most specifically with Peter Willis of the Mirror) that he was romantically involved with Valente, and that the relationship began during the recording of the record, offering a worthwhile point of comparison with the album he recorded with Mayte.

  Of all the Prince protégé albums, this is the most musically somniferous. The worst of the record sounds like something you’d hear in a Greek disco, but the lyrics have surprising bite. There’s a shout-out to his former girlfriend Kim Basinger in ‘Here Eye Come’ (the song that Prince used to introduce Valente to his fans via his 3121 website), in which Valente sings of fantasising about being the ‘dirty blonde girl’ in 9½ Weeks while showering. Prince began by comparing the record to Sade (the smooth-jazz artist rather than the marquis), then backtracked in a later interview when he felt this comparison had blinded critics to the quality of the record. ‘All This Love’ is about obsession, while ‘Home’ has Prince using Egyptology once again, with a m
uch more dramatic arrangement than anything else on the album. ‘Something U Already Know’ is as saccharine in its lyrics as the music, disrupted only by the image of making love on a rocking horse. Though it’s distinguished by Clare Fischer strings, ‘Everytime’ is even less appealing schmaltz. ‘2Nite’ has a house beat and a ‘disco, disco’ chant; with Valente celebrating sexy people dancing, it’s embarrassing and awful. ‘Another Boy’, the album’s single, is the strongest track, though it wasn’t enough to make Valente’s name. ‘Kept Woman’ is marginally less good (though better arranged) than Támar’s unreleased version, but it’s an undeniably impressive song, although there’s something ruthless about the way Prince gave Valente a co-writing credit on a song first performed by a former protégée, especially one which seems designed to create the illusion of autobiographical truth and which features yet another controlling male. ‘Immersion’ continues the light sci-fi feel of much of Prince’s music of this time, imagining an alternative universe beyond time and space, married to light jazz; it’s a strange and not very good track that shares the weaknesses of Lotusflow3r. The album concludes with its title track, one Prince liked so much he would perform it live (as he also would with ‘All This Love’). His vocal presence is more prominent here than anywhere else on the record, but it’s an unpleasant song, the cunnilingus punchline somehow lacking all the charm Prince used to have when using such innuendo.

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  Bria Valente’s record is the last of Prince’s recordings with protégés to get an official release, but he hasn’t stopped wanting to work with other female singers. He wrote a song for a new album by Sheila E and has occasionally made reference to a Shelby J record, which has yet to appear, as well as collaborating with a variety of new female singers in live performance, including Janelle Monáe, whom he took as support on his Welcome 2 America tour, jazz singer Esperanza Spalding and Portuguese fado singer Ana Moura, with whom he performed a fado during a Portuguese date on the 20Ten tour and about which she told the Guardian, ‘… it was magical. All the Portuguese went crazy, and then when he started to play everyone went quiet – people had the sensation that they went to another level.’12

  At the time of writing, Prince has taken a new female singer called Andy Allo on tour with him as part of his band, even playing her songs during the main shows. Often the female artists with whom he collaborates onstage speak of jams and private recordings, of sharing music behind closed doors, but he seems to be allowing Allo to be more free with his music, perhaps in a desire to connect with her generation while remaining aloof himself, letting her place live recordings, out-takes and new versions of his songs on her Facebook page. Whether an Allo album follows or their collaboration remains focused on the stage, it’s clear that Prince continues to take inspiration from those around him, and that championing young female musicians remains as important to him today as when he first met Sue Ann Carwell.

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  AN ENTIRELY NEW GALAXY AWAITS …

  [My father] used to say things like, ‘Don’t ever get a girl pregnant, don’t ever get married,’ don’t this, don’t that. When he’d say these things, I didn’t know what to take from it, so I would create my own universe … and my sister’s like that, a lot of my friends are like that, the ones that I still have, early musicians and things like that. Creating your own universe is the key to it, I believe … and letting all the people that you need occupy that universe.

  Prince, interview on The Tavis Smiley Show, 27 April 2009

  Imaginary universes, like the one Prince describes above, have been defined by psychologists as ‘paracosms’. But this term is usually used to describe whole imaginary fictional worlds, like the one created by the Brontë sisters. Prince’s have a more complicated relationship with reality than most. It is also worth noting that while fictional worlds are often created by isolated individuals who can’t cope with reality, Prince’s universe is not a solitary one, but one he’s tried to fill first with talented fellow artists, then his fans.

  The story of Lotusflow3r.com is a sad one. Prince’s last attempt to date to create an alternative universe for his followers, it was, it seems, doomed to failure almost from the start. It could be seen as the final schism between Prince and the true believers, or at least the end of the super-close relationship between him and his fans, which has now been replaced with a much more distant one.1

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  As usual, news of Prince’s new direction leaked out slowly. He went through a relatively quiet period following the 21 Nights in London run, with barely a handful of live shows in 2008, the majority taking place at Prince’s own private residence. The main release that year was the 21 Nights book and the accompanying Indigo Nights live album.

  I reviewed this publication for a British newspaper and was rewarded with an invitation to both the British and the American launches. The British one, sans Prince, was a sedate affair at the Dorchester, the hotel Prince had stayed at during his O2 run and which featured in the 21 Nights book. But the American launch, at the Hotel Gansevoort in New York’s Meatpacking District, was the best book launch I’ve ever been to (and I’ve been to over a thousand) because it featured over four and a half hours of live performance from Prince and a stand-up set from Dave Chappelle. Only Prince could separate his book launch into a main show and after-show, especially as this performance took place in a hotel room in front of around two hundred people (midway through the party, overzealous staff threw out anyone with the wrong colour wristband, and they were just about to march me out when I produced the correct accreditation). It’s further evidence of how brilliant Prince is at hiding the original composition time of songs, as when he introduced ‘Colonized Mind’ and made it seem as if he’d written it that afternoon in response to the stock-market meltdown that had taken place that day, it seemed perfectly plausible.

  That night he also played ‘Crimson and Clover’ and ‘(There’ll Never B) Another Like Me’, the first indication of the new record(s) Prince had been putting together during his time off the road. In 2008, he released ‘Colonized Mind’ and ‘Crimson and Clover’ to Indie 103, a Los Angeles radio station, along with two other tracks, ‘4Ever’ and ‘Wall of Berlin’. Both ‘4Ever’ and ‘Wall of Berlin’ featured musicians Prince had worked with on 3121, but not since. From the perspective of 2011, these latter two songs are largely forgotten and seem like the sort of out-takes that might have been left in the Vault in earlier eras, but at the time Prince’s choice of release method seemed chosen to make a point: these heavier tracks did seem more suited to an indie station than a dance one, and given the indie covers that began to appear in Prince’s live set around this time (most notably Radiohead’s ‘Creep’, which he’d played at that year’s Coachella festival), it seemed that he might have had a new audience in mind.

  Once again, after the innovative release strategies for Musicology and Planet Earth, Prince sought out the best way of getting money and hype for the records he possibly could, doing a deal with Target superstores in the US and setting up a website through which listeners elsewhere in the world would be able to download the albums. The only unique song people who had paid $77 to join the site received as an initial download was ‘The Morning After’, a brief and lightweight power-pop song (believed to be an out-take from an original version of 3121)2 in which Prince sings about wanting more commitment from a casual lover, which replaced ‘Crimson and Clover’ on the download version of the record. (Later, Prince would post the truly terrible ‘Cause and Effect’ on the site, although it wasn’t an exclusive as he also released it to a radio station, one of many signs that he was not treating the site’s users with any particular respect.) Site users did, however, get the album five days before Target shoppers, and for many of the world’s Prince fans, the site was the only legal way of getting the CDs at all.

  My experiences with Prince’s previous Internet sites had been minimal; before I started writing this book I was far less interested in the computer side of his busine
ss. I’d got in at the tail end of the NPG Music Club experience, just in time to download the music and get a few decent tickets, but not long enough to feel like the site’s closure was any great loss. But I confess to falling for the Lotusflow3r.com hype. While wiser (and already burnt) Prince fans moaned about the disappointment they felt when their ‘lifetime’ memberships to the NPG Music Club turned out to refer only to the lifetime of the website, I sat in front of my computer in the early hours of the morning, watching the timer click down on the purple dynamite on Lotusflow3r.com’s home page, waiting for it to go live. Prince and the website designers had appeared to make many promises about what the site would contain, but in language so cryptic that it was hard to know with any certainty what we would get for our money. I contacted Lotusflow3r.com designer Scott Addison Clay about his experiences of working with Prince, but he told me he had to decline to comment. He did talk to the Wall Street Journal a year earlier, however, expressing his disillusionment with the process of creating the website. ‘We only got stuff in dribs and drabs,’ he told the paper, speculating that the number of fans who joined was a disappointment to Prince.3

  The main inducement to join the site at the very beginning – aside from the albums – was the opportunity to buy advance tickets for three shows in Los Angeles in three different venues with three different bands (oh, and a T-shirt). New users’ patience was tested by a secret code you had to crack before getting access to tickets, the sort of thing that might entertain a web designer but which irritated anyone expecting a reward for their investment. In spite of getting onto the site seconds after it went live, I could only get tickets to the first of the three shows Prince was playing: a main show in front of an enormous audience.